Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it. The great dilemma of our shrinking world is simple: never before have those we disagree with been so present in our lives. The more globalization dissolves national borders, the more clearly we see that human beings are deeply divided on moral lines - about everything from tax codes to sexual practices to energy consumption - and that, when we really disagree, our emotions turn positively tribal.

Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

The father of cognitive neuroscience and author of Human offers a provocative argument against the common belief that our lives are wholly determined by physical processes and we are therefore not responsible for our actions.

How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making

In How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making, Professor Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, uses research revealed via the scientific method to understand and explain human decision making. While his easygoing manner and anecdotes about surprising and bizarre choices will keep you enthralled, Professor Hamilton also shares what decision science has revealed through empirically tested theories.

Food for the Heart: The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah

This collection brings together for the first time Ajahn Chah's most powerful teachings, including those on meditation, liberation from suffering, calming the mind, enlightenment and the "living dhamma". Most of these talks have previously only been available in limited, private editions and the publication of Food for the Heart, therefore, represents a momentous occasion: the hugely increased accessibility of his words and wisdom.

Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality

What is morality? Where does it come from? And why do most of us heed its call most of the time? In Braintrust, neurophilosophy pioneer Patricia Churchland argues that morality originates in the biology of the brain. She describes the "neurobiological platform of bonding" that, modified by evolutionary pressures and cultural values, has led to human styles of moral behavior. The result is a provocative genealogy of morals that asks us to reevaluate the priority given to religion, absolute rules, and pure reason in accounting for the basis of morality.

Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives

With its trillions of connections, the human brain is more beautiful and complex than anything we could ever build, but it’s far from perfect: our memory is unreliable; we can’t multiply large sums in our heads; advertising manipulates our judgment; we tend to distrust people who are different from us; supernatural beliefs and superstitions are hard to shake; we prefer instant gratification to long-term gain; and what we presume to be rational decisions are often anything but.

Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction

"The last great mystery for science," consciousness has become a controversial topic. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction challenges listeners to reconsider key concepts such as personality, free will, and the soul. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion? Exciting new developments in brain science are opening up these debates, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers.

How the Mind Works

In this delightful, acclaimed bestseller, one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational—and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness?

Life: The Leading Edge of Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Anthropology, and Environmental Science

Scientists' understanding of life is progressing more rapidly than at any point in human history, from the extraordinary decoding of DNA to the controversial emergence of biotechnology. Featuring pioneering biologists, geneticists, physicists, and science writers, Life explains just how far we've come - and takes a brilliantly educated guess at where we're heading.

Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

In the mid-20th century, Michael S. Gazzaniga made one of the great discoveries in the history of neuroscience: split-brain theory, the notion that the right and left hemispheres of the brain can act independently from each other and have different strengths.

Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

In Arrival of the Fittest, renowned evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner draws on over 15 years of research to present the missing piece in Darwin's theory. Using experimental and computational technologies that were heretofore unimagined, he has found that adaptations are not just driven by chance, but by a set of laws that allow nature to discover new molecules and mechanisms in a fraction of the time that random variation would take.

Max Tegmark leads us on an astonishing journey through past, present and future, and through the physics, astronomy, and mathematics that are the foundation of his work, most particularly his hypothesis that our physical reality is a mathematical structure and his theory of the ultimate multiverse. In a dazzling combination of both popular and groundbreaking science, he not only helps us grasp his often mind-boggling theories, but he also shares with us some of the often surprising triumphs and disappointments that have shaped his life as a scientist.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits, denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control.

Lying

As it was in Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Othello, so it is in life. Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption - even murder and genocide - generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie. In Lying, bestselling author and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues that we can radically simplify our lives and improve society by merely telling the truth in situations where others often lie.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe.

Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

First published in 2000, Words and Rules remains one of Pinker's most provocative and accessible books, illuminating the fascinating relationship between the brain, the mind, and how language makes us humans.

A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

"I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla," writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist's coming-of-age in remote Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolsky's twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate's Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti-for man and beast alike.

The Self Illusion: Why There Is No "You" Inside Your Head

The Self Illusion provides a fascinating examination of how the latest science shows that our individual concept of a self is in fact an illusion. Most of us believe that we possess a self - an internal individual who resides inside our bodies, making decisions, authoring actions and possessing free will. The feeling that a single, unified, enduring self inhabits the body is compelling and inescapable. But that sovereignty of the self is increasingly under threat from science as our understanding of the brain advances.

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation

If, as Darwin suggests, evolution relentlessly encourages the survival of the fittest, why are humans compelled to live in cooperative, complex societies? In this fascinating examination of the roots of human trust and virtue, a zoologist and former American editor of The Economist reveals the results of recent studies that suggest that self-interest and mutual aid are not at all incompatible. In fact, he points out, our cooperative instincts may have evolved as part of mankind's natural selfish behavior - by exchanging favors we can benefit ourselves as well as others.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts

Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception.

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran is internationally renowned for uncovering answers to the deep and quirky questions of human nature that few scientists have dared to address. His bold insights about the brain are matched only by the stunning simplicity of his experiments - using such low-tech tools such as cotton swabs, glasses of water, and dime-store mirrors.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

In this sparkling and provocative new book, the renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman navigates the depths of the subconscious brain to illuminate surprising mysteries. Taking in brain damage, plane spotting, dating, drugs, beauty, infidelity, synesthesia, criminal law, artificial intelligence, and visual illusions, Incognito is a thrilling subsurface exploration of the mind and all its contradictions.

Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts

How does the brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state.

Publisher's Summary

Will increased scientific understanding of our brains overturn our beliefs about moral and ethical behavior? How will increasingly powerful brain imaging technologies affect the ideas of privacy and of self-incrimination?

Such thought-provoking questions are rapidly emerging as new discoveries in neuroscience have raised difficult legal and ethical dilemmas. Michael Gazzaniga, widely considered to be the father of cognitive neuroscience, investigates with an expert eye some of these controversial and complex issues in The Ethical Brain.

What the Critics Say

The enjoyable, thought-provoking book will introduce readers to complex interplay between neuroscience and ethics. (Science)"None of the ideas are necessarily new in The Ethical Brain, but it is still an easy-to-read survey that treats the reader to an overview of the entire set of issues pertaining to morals and the brain." (Science and Theology News)"Gazzaniga eschews easy answers in exploring the potential and limits of neuroscience." (USA Today)"[The Ethical Brain] does not address practical ethical questions that may confront clinicians in daily practice. Nevertheless, the strength...is the author's perspective as a neuroscientist, which will introduce the reader to complex aspects of neuroscience in relation to behavior society." (Journal of the American Medica Association)In The Ethical Brain, [Gazzaniga] does not shy away from taking on the loaded question...when does an embryo become a human being--"one of us"? His thoughtful discussion makes The Ethical Brain a worthwhile read." (San Jose Mercury)"Michael S. Gazzaniga takes an unflinching lok at the interface between neuroscience and ethics, and offers his own thoughtful perspective on some of the tough questions. (Media Times Review Blog)The Ethical Brain provides us with cautions--prominent among them that 'neuroscience will never find the brain correlate of responsibility, because that is something we ascribe to humans--to people--not to brains. It is a moral value we demand of our fellow, rule-following human beings.' This statement--coming as it does from so eminent a neuroscientist--is a cultural contirbution in itself." (The New York Times)

While I don't agree with all of the author's conclusions, implied as they may be, I learned much from this book as a left brain. And while I am what would be called "pro-life," on the abortion issue, Dr. Gazzaniga presents the debate in a way that really forces one to think it through without emotion.

The question of when life begins, in terms of the brain is really out there. It's kind of like looking up at the stars on a clear night and wondering how it all began.

But the book covers many other aspects of the brain, behavior, and ethical implications which are well thought out and presented. If anybody thinks that George Bush was "anti-science" they should take a listen to this by a man who was appointed by Bush to his Council on Bioethics.

This book was so bad I had to switch it off after only 30 minutes because I got so frustrated I almost drove my car off the road while listening to it. It's philosophically unsound -- although the author claims to have much to say about ethics he clearly hasn't read much on the subject. His ideas on neurophilosophy are similarly unsound. Lots of unclarified assumptions and 'common sense' reasoning that doesn't help anyone. Bummer I bought it!

This book contains very little relevant science, and thus doesn't appear to be a science book. It is also not a book of philosophy, in the sense of establishing a coherent theory based on a well-defined set of premises. Rather, it seems to be a collection of random thoughts of the sort one might discuss over a barstool. So if you are curious about Michael Gazzaniga's vague musings about ethics, you'll like this book. If you wanted to learn something more general about ethics, you won't.

The only reason to listen to this is to find straw-man arguments that are easily assailed.

What do you think your next listen will be?

Power of Habit by Duhigg

Which character – as performed by Patrick Lawlor – was your favorite?

n/a

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Gazzaniga is clearly well versed in his speciality - neuroscience - but as soon as he ventures outside those bounds he is incredibly pedestrian.

Any additional comments?

Gazzaniga's attempts at philosophy, sociology, and anthropology are remarkably thoughtless. I'm not typically a review-writer, but feel compelled to warn others of this book's shortcomings which are many and manifest. His competence in his field is unquestioned - the neuroscience aspects were interesting. But anything beyond his expertise is painful. Unfortunately the majority of the book is Gazzaniga venturing outside his expertise.

One example of the myriad: his support of embryonic stem cell research dismisses any actual discussion of the various sides with this metaphor: an embryo is like a human being like a home depot is like a house. There's so much wrong with this it's hard to know where to start. He is completely ignorant of the discussion on various types of potentiality and actuality that have been a part of philosophy for about 2500 years. The embryo will of its own devices fulfill its potentiality to become a fully formed human being. The home depot requires intervention from beyond itself to become a house. The embryo has active potentiality. The home depot has passive potentiality. The embryo becomes what it is supposed to be. The home depot becomes something completely different than what it is. It may be that this argument isn't convincing, but it clearly should be discussed.

He's also apparently ignorant of the discussions of what makes an organism an organism - it's self-organization. This isn't a trivial problem. It's one of our leading neuroscientists who writes books on ethics and sat on the President's Bioethics Council being ignorant of basic philosophical concepts.

Honestly, if you're looking for arguments that are easily shot down, take a listen. If you're looking to actually learn something, look elsewhere.